Visit Amsterdam in September
WeatherOne are looking forward to see you at booth 2.C11 in hall 2 between 9th and 13th of September this year. We will be showcasing the latest demos and features. Contact us upfront if there is something specific you want to have demonstrated.

See you there!

Wide Aspect
WeatherOne (Oslo) cooperated with Kanal 2 (Tallinn), a long time Metacast® Software user, to upgrade their weather show to a 16:9 production. Based on a three day workshop in Oslo, Kanal 2 launched their new weather show in in May 2011. The entire show is an autoproduction produced on a localized Metacast® system and presented in studio by their weather presentation staff.

High Pressure
Of things to note in the new show is the synoptic map of high/low pressure with wind streamlines that requires no manual input in daily production. Creative use of the palette editor in the Metacast® software made it possible to display high and low pressure zones as red and blue areas to further explain the developing weather situation.

See their daily production at reporter.ee

Visualizing 12 field layers (six wind layers and six temperature layers from surface to 300mb) from the .5 degree GFS model. Cold winds are blue and warm winds are red. Particles appear at wind speeds above 10 m/s. Size is relative to speed.

The effect is that the Tropical Depression is forecasted 72 hours ahead.

A visualization of how ground temeprature is dependent on the sun…

Google Earth can be used to display NOAA HYSPLIT model trajectories

To make a forecast
The following method will create your own forecast of where the air from 50m above the reactor could go starting at 1200 UTC, 1800 UTC, 2400 UTC and 0600 UTC. Add +9 hours to get local time in Japan (JST). This does not track or forecast any nuclear fallout, but indicates where the air 50m above the reactor could travel.

1. Choose trajectory model.
2. Then we want to forecast the movement.
3. Leave the trajectory settings with defaults.
4. Choose GFS model as the source of meteorological data and enter latitude: 37.420514 & Longitude: 141.033322 for the Fukushima Daiichi power plant (Click “Continue”).
5. Select the latest forecast cycle (newest data) (Click “Next”).
6. Configure the details:
   1. Set “Start time (UTC):” “hour:” to 12. This will start the simulation at 2100 JST local time, Japan.
   2. Set “Start a new trajectory every:” to 6 hrs and 4 trajectories. This will give the a line for every 6 hours.
   3. Set “Level 1 height:” to 50 meters. This will track the air at 50 meters above the plant.
   4. Set “GIS output?” to “Google Earth (kmz)”. This will give you the possibility to open it in Google Earth.
   5. Click “Request trajectory”
7. Wait a few seconds (10 seconds usually).
8. Click the kmz link for Google Earth
9. See the result and playback the trackers in Google Earth
   

   The four tracks describe the travel of air over time and space with 6 hours interval

Notice the details in the data, for example the vortex formed in the Barents Sea. The difference between sea and land temperature is also striking.

Precipitation anomalies for January to December 2008

This data set contains gridded precipitation anomalies. Gridded data for every month from January 1900 to the most recent month is available. The data are precipitation anomalies in millimeters. Each gridded value was multiplied by 100 and written to file as an integer. Missing values are represented by the value -32768.

The data are formatted by year, month, latitude and longitude. There are twelve longitude grid values per line, so there are 6 lines (72/12 = 6) for each of the 36 latitude bands. Longitude values are written from 180 W to 180 E, and latitude values from 90 N to 90 S. Data for each month is preceded by a label containing the month and year of the gridded data.

Get data: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/ghcn-gridded-prcp.html#data

Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov